Good grief, I know, I make a bad habit of constantly repeating myself on this blog, but right now, I have a few excuses, namely one: I’m sick, and I’ve been drinking Hot Toddies, so I’m in a position to not be completely in my head.

When I first left fundamentalist/evangelical Christianity and entered into the world of religious exploration, the religions to which I finally came after all was said and done were Wicca and Buddhism. For years, I held these two, and they stayed in conflict theologically. I could never make up my mind which I was, and I simply had to say that I was both Wiccan and Buddhist- a concept that not many people could grasp.

This same cycle repeated itself in recent years with Christianity and Sufism.

The content came down to this: one system would articulate the need for inner transformation and offer Nirvana, and the other system would offer a set of rituals and an external beauty; one religion focused on the inner world, and another the outer world.

More hurtful is the process of trying to explain to others that I don’t actually change my religion, I only change the “language” in which I speak that religion. It has been a long and difficult road, and it’s difficult for me to guess that someone could pick a religion, agree with everything in it, and then go on in life with, “Well, that’s that.”

Yet I do envy those people on one level.

Anyway, the more I reflect on it, the more I realize that perhaps it was not Wicca and Buddhism that were in conflict but rather my idea of what each represented to me: one represented power in this world, one represented liberation from everything.

In other words, one represented a catering to the ego, the other represented its destruction and dissolution.

Now, of course, we also have huge problems with Wicca for other reasons. The system is admirable, to be sure, in its most idealized form- it is, in my opinion, a stripping down of Western religion and an iteration of it through generalized symbols for the archetypes and the Divine. The original form of Wicca with which we are acquainted, from the mid-1900s, actually has several laws and by-laws and so on.

Modern day Wicca isn’t quite the same. Instead, it’s become a Pop Witchcraft phenomenon; there are infinite numbers of cheesy Wicca 101 books to be found in every bookstore, and though some of them have tons of information, they almost invariably miss the point or don’t go deep enough.

Some would say that about 99% of religion, but I’m not here to address that.

Some would also say that I could’ve simply taken the Buddhist deities and inserted them into the Wiccan pantheon and gone from there.

This brings us to one of the most irritating aspects of Wicca: when people, who don’t understand what it is, who haven’t studied it, who have no idea that there is something to be said for organization and tradition, say the damnable words, “It’s whatever you want it to be.”

No. No, the fuck it isn’t. It’s never been “whatever you want it to be” and it never will be. If you want a religion that’s “whatever you want it to be,” go call yourself an Eclecto-Religio-Practice-Person or something, don’t call yourself Wiccan.

Back to the Buddhist pantheon. First, I understood that, while there may be Buddhist deities who cater to the various spheres of life, Wicca, too, was a Western, not an Eastern, thing. Randomly inserting Eastern traditions into the Western mindset would upset some kind of balance I saw in the whole process, and besides, the Buddhists don’t necessarily work with the deities in the way that a Wiccan would, so the process is culturally and theoretically removed.

This, too, was the beginning of trying to make things all fit together, of trying to have the so-called elusive “seamless garment.”

Wicca, on the whole, has turned into a kind of Protestantism. Not Protestant Christianity, but Protestant OF Christianity. The few individuals who would dare take Christ entities and insert them into the Wicca system are immediately dubbed “Christo-Pagans” and ridiculed.

But in a way, that ridicule is understandable; somewhere, hidden in the depths of Wicca, IS the Protestantism FROM Christianity; it’s part of its heritage, its lifeblood, complete with the mythology of the “burning times” and blaming Christianity for everything bad that ever happened, not unlike the dimwitted Modern Atheists™.

A good example of this I read recently was on a series of articles I once praised on witchvox.com. The author did a good job (or so I had thought) in going through Wicca, doing research, and separating what can be traced to ancient religions and cultures and what was most likely an invention of Gardner.

Then I saw a statement about the Cakes and Ale. Now, recently, Michael and I had a conversation about how the Wiccan communion is related to the Holy Eucharist; indeed, this much is obvious, because it maintains a certain thematic integrity.

But the author of this article said that the Eucharist was based on the Celtic ritual of blessing grains and alcohol, and that the Roman Church “borrowed” the ritual, and then Gardner “borrowed” it back.

That’s an example of shitty scholarship, folks.

Now, I’m not going to try to convince anyone, including myself, that the Holy Eucharist is entirely something related to the Passover meal and Jesus’s words and so on, but let’s not forget that DID happen. Pagans and Jews alike pretty much ate bread and drank alcohol, so saying the Celts blessed grain and alcohol (AKA, prayed over food) and that somehow the Catholics stole this idea of blessing food and inserted Jesus into the mix just doesn’t make any sense.

But then, there are the Wiccans who say that the Christians stole all things ritual from them, and then there are the Christians who agree with the Wiccans that the Eucharistic traditions did just that; neither group checks into the rituals written of in the Hebrew Bible, apparently, where there are candles, incense, bread, wine, and prayers everywhere.

Oh, yeah, and there’s that part in Genesis about the High Priest Melchizedek offering bread and wine to God Most High.

So the idea of bread and wine being offered to the Divine is a pretty ancient idea, just saying.

And also, I should point out, I’m not here to defend Christianity or discuss the atrocities committed in Christ’s Name or anything along those lines; Christianity will have a great deal to answer for in the hereafter, even as it has a great deal to answer for in the here and now.

Nor am I here to blast sincere, seeking Wiccans. Wicca has a good theory underlying it, and it’s potentially empowering for the individual. The mysticism in it is underdeveloped, but as it stands, so is the mysticism in modern-day Christianity. We mystics must, in fact, dip rather deep to find it a good deal of the time.

Erik and I discussed these things, and I told him a very true point: after all is said and done, I would MUCH rather be a Pop Wiccan than a Pop Christian. What I mean to say by this is that the “Pop Christian” books by individuals such as Joyce Meyer and Joel Osteen are just awful. The worldview through which they operate, the American Evangelical perspective, is just terrible. I would rather be a Pop Wiccan and do my little rituals and wave my little knife any day of the year.

A good thing about Wicca is that it made me feel like life has meaning; it made me feel as though Nature truly was holy, powerful, and a good thing. I could appreciate the changing of the seasons as part of the Great Happening of reality.
But then, I was always more focused on casting spells than I was on actually practicing a religion, so I mean, yeah.

Gnosticism did offer me a great deal of comfort, as it seems, in many respects, to be the meeting ground of Christianity, Wicca, and Buddhism. So three primary religions influencing me in my life ended up being rolled into one.

Jordan Stratford jokingly says that Gnostics are Catholic on the outside and Buddhist on the inside, and I think this wouldn’t necessarily be far off; I would edit that to say that Gnostics are more like Buddhists wearing Christian vestments or something.

But that doesn’t devalue the more orthodox Christian mysticism, either- Christianity is replete with symbols that have a lot to offer us.
Then again, so is Wicca, and you see how often that devolves into crap.

I think Wicca does have a problem with not being defined enough. It’s the double-edged sword; one is free to do whatever, but one doesn’t necessarily know WHAT to do.

If Wicca had specific symbols associated with the Wheel of the Year, I think it would make it easier. Perhaps there ARE definite symbols, signs, and underlying meaning present in the Wheel, and I’ve just failed to recognize. It wouldn’t be the first time.

When more thoughts come, I’ll write more. I’ve been so into writing lately, all these thoughts pouring through me, even though I’m sick, I can’t help but continue to write down my concepts.
Also, I should point out that in Wicca, the God is associated with Day and the Goddess with Night. I actually encountered the Divine in the opposite way- Sky/Day Mother, Earth/Night Father. It’s very strange that my actual experience would be in contrast to what is constantly repeated in Wicca, and that seems to be a huge problem- people repeating beliefs, repeating ideas, with NO experience to back them up.

One person, in fact, told me when, I spoke about the Earth Father Archetype, that he thinks of the Earth as both masculine and feminine; he missed the entire point and threw some theoretical, all-inclusive bullshit at me. Then again, if he were to speak of experiencing the Earth as both, that would be a different story.

The point is, this was an experience, an encounter, a real-time happening, not a mental concept that someone wrote about that I said, “Oh, that sounds good.” This was actual.

I can understand the feminine associations with the Earth, but it’s strange that the Earth would appear to me as masculine- and as Christ, no less.

I spoke with my friend Drew last night, briefly. We discussed our differences in outlooks concerning sinfulness- he has a more Islamic/Buddhist (and, according to Michael, Jewish) view- that humans are essentially good and that we can do evil things, but that the evil things are not evidence of a particular state of being.

My perspective, at this point, is different; everyone may already understand that I think we do have a sinful nature, that we are essentially rotten to the core.

Perhaps I should edit this, and say that it’s more accurate to say that is my fear- my fear is that, in this darkness, there is no God, there is only a Devil, and that we live in a chaotic world where it is the Lord and nothing will stop it from causing us to create destruction and evil, that good is simply an attempt for us to struggle against what’s real- namely, evil.

The intensity of the evil has sense faded but remains with me in a kind of ghostly manner- the smoke after the fire, if you will.

If we humans truly exist in a state where our innate nature is to hurt God (if indeed there is a God that is not Satan), then I am at a loss of what to say about reality, about life, about what the hell’s going on.

On the practical level, when arrested by these situations, the best thing to do is continue spiritual practice. So I’ve continued the dhikr/Hesychasm to the best of my ability, continued the Devotion to the Sacred Heart, and so on.

Then, yesterday, I took a daring turn. I said Mass again, the private Mass that I’ve been saying. I took the risk, knowing that it could potentially kill me, as I would be receiving in unworthily.

Yet, isn’t that part of the nature of Mass? We receive the Eucharist unworthily; we cannot make ourselves worthy. We rely on God’s grace.

And after the Mass, I felt alright, and I obviously did not die.

Later, when I readied myself for meditation, I was praying on my chotki. My chotki is actually a Tibetan Buddhist mala to which I’ve affixed a glitzy cross. It reminds me of Erik’s tree ornament and Jordan’s reference to how crosses of the ancient world were huge, jewel encrusted things. Very gorgeous, very ethereal in its own way.

So there I was, walking around, repeating the name of Christ, naked. I stared at the crucifix, asking all kinds of questions, wondering how these things fit together, what’s really going on. I’m at a loss at this point, because there’s never been anything in the mystical literature that explained what’s been happening to me.

I have looked into Jung’s explanations; he’s my first reference point to the Shadow. Jung posited two equally disturbing ideas that oddly make more sense than I would like for them to: in Jungian terms, the Trinity is, in a manner of speaking, incomplete. The Trinity seeks a Fourth, from the perspective of Masculinity that of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and from the perspective of the Good that of Evil, namely Satan.

Now, this is a terrifying concept; the idea of deifying Satan or that the Devil could in any way complete the Trinity is totally foreign to theology, but at the same time, there is an intuitive appeal to this notion. We see the idea of Good and Evil complementing one another and the destruction that they cause in such cases as The Dark Crystal.

But likewise, we see the opposite notion presented in the film Legend, in which the Devil-like entity is eventually destroyed and thrown into a vortex and whatnot.

The Blessed Virgin Mary has, in many cases, all but been lifted into the Trinity; theologically, the Church may officially not recognize her as Divine, but it’s still a reality- Mary is often regarded as being almost as important as Jesus, and, for the Christians that maintain God is exclusively in the masculine, she adds the important missing feminine element.

Personally, I have no problem with Mary’s deification; in fact, I encourage it.

Gnostics have a bit of a different route with this: the Holy Spirit is regarded as God the Mother, and God the Father is entirely beyond anything we can imagine, so “Father” especially becomes a relative term.

Anyway, the basic idea here is that somehow, the opposing forces have to have an alchemical fusion.

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, the Sufi teacher I’ve followed for so long, has said that we must accept our Shadow. He also says that our darkness becomes our own inner divinity.

That’s terrifying. So terrifying. The notion that somehow there is salvation for the Devil, who then becomes our own personal God.

At the same time, another idea I’ve kicked around is that perhaps the purification of the darkness IS the point- perhaps we are not all sent here to express the Light; perhaps we are sent here with darkness inside of us which we must purify and turn into Light, to redeem it. In other words, the Gnostic myth of Sophia’s fall is precisely what happens to us- except we are both Christ and Sophia, falling and being sent, to capture the darkness in ourselves and redeem it.

Thus, we participate in the act of salvation, being saviors of the universe, even as Christ is often said to be our savior.

Feeling alone doesn’t begin to describe what was going on last night. I just can’t figure out what’s happening, and I avoid thinking excessively about it- instead, I try to ask the important questions, the difficult ones, to face the things that others won’t, can’t, and aren’t.

I began trying to meditate and found it almost impossible to stop any thoughts; my mind was simply too far oriented towards figuring out this puzzle. Again, I’ve not seen anything in the literature I’ve read that explains WHAT TO DO at this point.

While trying to meditate, I prayed for the Holy Spirit to help me to pray; She is, after all, the means by which we learn to pray, are taught to pray. I heard a voice call my name, and part of the block in my heart chakra was removed.

Then an epiphany came.

I recalled last year when I was reading Pagan and Christian Creeds the parts about sacrifice and the evolution of sacrifice. I then remembered being at my friend’s birthday party in October of 2010 and standing near the campfire that was outside; I chanted, silently, the Hindu mantra “HUM” which is used for sacrifices, offering the burning fire as a ritual to God.

The feeling, the desire, to offer a sacrifice to a God is extremely primal, and then I realized something else: offering the Sacrifice of the Mass is synonymous with this. I realized that part of the ritual that is so important is that we’re programmed to sacrifice, to give up, to atone.

The longing returned to my heart. I realized that Christ is the Sacrifice, the Sacrifice to continually and eternally be offered to God. The importance of this realization is that Christ can at any time and any place be offered in our hearts to God.

So in all my beliefs about my wretchedness, in all my self-hatred, I came to a similar conclusion of Luther, in that I had to also accept God’s grace. That doesn’t mean that my penance has been for nothing; that doesn’t mean that my actions have not led me to where I am. Rather, it means that I affirm that the Mystery of Salvation takes place by the cooperation of Man and God, through Man’s Free Will and God’s Grace.

This, too, is exemplified in Christ- Christ is both God and Man, together, joining the natures. How perfect a Sacrifice!

God became man that man might become God.

I can’t begin to emphasize the importance of the Sacrificial nature of the Mass. This whole “let’s just remember Jesus” bullshit isn’t going to get us anywhere.

The epiphany had a greater character last night and has left and impression on me, though I’m waiting to see what happens next, because no one knows.

The oddness is how I’m still convinced that Christ can be offered to anything; it’s so strange to go from fearing that there is only an evil god ruling the world to somehow knowing that Christ can be given to God Most High.

Incidentally, that name is “El Elyon,” which can be easily read as “Alien.” If God turns out to be a grey alien, well, He can go ahead and delete me.

Resonance is an important but apparently often over-looked aspect of the mystic’s quest. For me, resonance ties in heavily with gnosis; resonance is a guiding principle by which I walk the path.

Resonance cannot easily be put into words; it is more than something simply seemingly like a neat idea and is instead something that is incredibly real, incredibly close to something real, incredibly indicative of something else.

Resonance deals with a meta-cognition, a meta-experience of sorts.

Resonance is what happens when I sit in a Church full of statues and stained glass, and, despite my rejection of so much of self-styled “orthodoxy,” I know that they still know something, that the people who have developed these things are still in tune with me somewhere.

All is not lost.

God help us.

Don’t ever overlook resonance to guide you, to help you. You will see things and know them for what they are to God and not what they are to man.

Things have begun to deepen or lighten up. The threshold is giving way into an unknown territory, the unknown land that we’ve all been to before but have forgotten.

I am standing again the Presence of God, but this is a different facet of God, a dark facet that I have rarely encountered.

The religion of the stars has returned to me, the Meta-Religion of mankind, the religion of the soul of which each and every religion and tradition in the world expresses a part, an aspect, an image.

It’s true, it’s easy to get lost in the practices, in the theology, in the images, but when reality intrudes, when God comes home, there’s no room for argument.

I’ve said “FUCK YOU” to God more times in the past year than I would’ve ever dared thinking of doing before. But I did it, and I have survived in whatever way, despite the momentary flashes of my survival instinct.

It is strange that only when I became absolutely hateful and irreverent towards God that God would dare reveal Itself. It counter-intuitive, it goes against everything that I ever believed or understand; it was only when I embraced Satan, when I embraced all the evil and hatred boiling inside of me as a paradox of my personality, as a contrast to the kind-hearted, generous, caring part of myself, that God began to crack through into my life in a more substantial way.

This process if far from over, but apparently, God wants me to be an asshole, at least part of the time. So I’m going to go with it.

In Forrest Gump, there’s a scene where Forrest and Lieutenant Dan are on a ship, and Dan constantly curses God, screaming and yelling at Him, challenging Him, going against Him, defying Him however he can…and I never put together the fact that the next scene is that Forrest and Dan’s ship is the ONLY ship that survives the storm.

So maybe the essence of it is courage. Maybe the essence of it is that God wants us to fight Him, to put a challenge, but not for His sake- for our sake, so that we can be shown how strong we truly are, so we can see our true colors, our true nature, whether that truth is good or bad.

But then, God is above and beyond taking offense, it would seem. God dances in the starlight He created, not caring about who would blaspheme Him or not.

It’s amazing. This Christmas has been a strange one so far, but the whole meaning of the Incarnation and so makes more and more sense. The Mystery of Christ is never exhausted. The Mystery of the Blessed Virgin is never exhausted.
I think that the darkness cannot comprehend the light, and I think that what we so often refer to as “Light” is actually only a prophet, testifying to the Light.

1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

2The same was in the beginning with God.

3All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

4In him was life; and the life was the light of men.

5And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

6There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.

7The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe.

8He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.

Those few verses speak of all kinds of cosmology. This the unfolding of the universe: unbound light that shines into matter that cannot process and reproduce the true nature of the Light, and then the human mind seeing traces and patterns of the Light in the world, but not itself being the Light.

Things have improved somewhat since yesterday. The experience is similar but not entirely the same; things seem to have mellowed out enough for the moment, and whatever this transformation may be, it seems to be continuing in its own way as it should be.

All I can do it cling to whatever symbols I’ve encountered in my journey and pray that things go deeper than this. Today, physically, I have felt under the weather; a bit of a sinus headache and generally a sense of being depleted energetically, though I did manage to get some studying and writing done.

There’s not been any true development at this point, other than a general lessening; I’m still painfully aware of the evil within myself, and I can accept that. I pray that whatever debauchery I fall into isn’t too consequential to make me suffer even more later on. Part of the issue into which I’m running is that I can never seem to just let go and rest, but that’s likely a by-product of being vigilant and stressed out from repression instead of expression. What is at the end of the road? I pray that this is worth it.

How best to write this blog, I don’t know. This started last night as I was falling asleep, as a great deal of my psycho-spiritual work takes place in the dream world and especially on the borders between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind.

Let us first go back to a few nights ago, during the weekend, when I had dreams. I dreamed of seeing my friends Pam, Michelle, and Brandi, and we were all going to Montgomery for some LGBT event. In the dream, it seemed we were awake early, and I remember being excessively tired and wanting to back to sleep. I remember stopping at a restaurant and needing to pee but being unable to find the bathroom or shut the door in the bathroom or something.

At another point, I recall being at my house, outside, in the sunlight, and reciting prayers. Then the Light came, the warmth, the Inner Light that I’ve seen more and more frequently.

Allow me to go back even further; the first experience with the Light happened when I was in high school or had just started college; I can’t remember exactly when it was. When I first began participating in Wicca and doing rituals, I ended up triggering some kind of kundalini energy, which was often apparent in a hypnogogic state of mind.

The experience was one of intense vibrations, of an inability to move, of an expanded psychic awareness; the vibrations felt like I would be shaken to pieces, and a few times, I felt like I would come out of my body (though I never had an experience of astral projection.)

One time, this process continued, and then I suddenly saw a light. The light was so bright and so apparent that I thought someone had turned on a light in the room. I came out of the state and threw the covers off my head- nothing. No light. I was still in the dark.

I asked the only “mystic” I knew at the time what the light was. His response, in his pseudo-guruship idiocy was merely, “Shut up.”

Anyway, last year, I had a similar experience and posted about it on Facebook. When I would come into the light, everything would be still. No vibrations, no noise, just light- dead silence.

The terrifying part about this Light is that I’m the only person there. There is no God, no angel, no entity, nothing- just me.

Now, more recently, this has happened in a more gradual way. Back to last weekend’s dream. I was outside my house in the dream, I began praying, and the light gradually appeared. Now, I noted that it was warm, that it was real, that the more I prayed, the greater it became. There was no absolute silence; the vibrations came but were not strong. I think I prayed to not die, because the pressure on my chest grew so great I thought my heart might stop.

Now, to bring us up to speed: last night. I read an article yesterday that discussed how violence is addictive in the same way as food, drugs, and sex can be. That makes sense, and I would note that a good part of my own Shadow (in Jungian terms) is a repression of my sense of violence and aggression. I often lament the modern-day culture that seems to think that if we just all decide to be happy and not hate people that those things will go away. But the problem is, our inner evil is born with us. Men do not become evil. They only discover they are evil, then go from there.

Years ago, perhaps in the first hypnogogic experience ever, I was quite young. I had almost forgotten about the experience, but I recall that it involved a process where the “seed of Satan” was planted in me, and I remember being terrified and hearing people scream that it was too late, the “seed of Satan” had already been planted.

Last night, this all collapsed in on me, combined with my sense of shame and guilt that pervade so many aspects of my life, and I realized that Satan was inside of me.

This is not an easy realization. In fact, to accept that anything remotely related to the concept of “the Devil” exists, much less that it exists inside of me, is anathema to everything I’ve gone through since I left evangelical Christianity at age 15.

Then last night, I had strange dreams, but the dreams ultimately culminated in seeing the light again at one point while praying, and then in having a dream that involved a grey alien. Instead of running from the alien, instead of screaming, I reached out and touched its face as it began screaming at me.

Then I awoke with the dreaded epiphany, a realization that I did not want to face, a horrifying twist in the story of reality.

I realized that I am Satan.

Maybe it would be better to say that I am “a Satan.” But the core of me stood up, and I realized I was evil, out for myself and only myself, and that all good will was an attempt to steer myself away from what I truly and really wanted.

I could put this in Jungian terms and say that I’m facing my “Shadow,” but I want to express this as gravely as possible to make clear the reality of it.

The violence, the sex, the desire to destroy, the desire to cause mayhem, pain, destruction, and hurt other people simply because I want to revel in their hurt- indeed, the idea of destruction and more destruction makes me so giddy, so enthralled, that I can’t imagine that I would have ever presented to anyone in the world that I was a good person, that I had any sense of ethics or holiness.

It truly bewildering and somehow a great cosmic joke to have sought God and the Truth so fervently only to discover that the Truth is that I myself am Satan. All the the things I’ve read about our Higher Self, our Soul, some Divine aspect of ourselves; all of it rendered rubbish by one real experience.

I sought gnosis. Well, I got it. I got what I wanted- at least part of it- and even though I don’t like what I see, I accept it because that’s all I can do.

Naturally, during this process, there are moments when I see myself as Satan and then see myself as containing mostly Satan. This sense of absolute sinfulness, of not only being pure sinfulness, but being the actual cause of sin in the first place, and the notion that I will burn forever because of the mayhem, is ridiculously strong.

Yet to see that I don’t care about the eternal judgment, so long as I can bring down everything with me, is what ultimately is bewildering. I can’t care about tomorrow when today I can steal, kill, and destroy.

Is there forgiveness for me? I don’t know. I have never felt this evil before. I have never felt this level of “bad.”

The only good news is that, knowing that I am the worst thing that exists, I understand that I have reached the ontological threshold of “bad.” Nothing can be worse or more awful than this inner Satan phenomenon. This is it. This is THE worst thing, from which all bad things flow.

The kind of power that exists in Satan is amazing. It is truly amazing. I understand his words to Christ that if he bows down and worships him, he can give Him anything He desires. It’s true. Having this sense of evil inside makes me have confidence I didn’t know I could have. When you just don’t give a fuck about anyone else, well, you don’t have anything to lose.

So this is where I am. I wondered when I first broke with Christianity if perhaps I were the Antichrist- I loved all religions, I wanted to see peace in the world, and I’m a grade-A Sodomite. The perfect Antichrist cocktail.

This whole process is exhausting, all this awful emotions, and the awful sense that I could get exactly what wanted by crushing anyone and anything that’s in my way while simultaneously standing horrified that it’s possible and that I’m somehow the cause of it.

If this is only the integration of the Shadow, well, by God, I pray for every bit of grace possible, but I dare not receive Christ in the Eucharist, unworthy as I am now, for it would surely kill me.

Pray for me, Holy Mother of God, that I may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.